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Thinkbig lab has become the blog of Thinkbig Factoryand Openarch project. By now Ion Cuervas-Mons is the writer of all posts but there will be new writers soon. The areas we are interested in are architecture, cities, strategic design, advanced tecnologies, design thinking, smart cities, internet of things, user experience and interaction design.

Thinkbig Factory is an architecture and design consultancy that creates opportunities between digital and physical realities helping organizations to grow and innovate.

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I stole this wonderful title from an article by Edwin Gardner where explains how the social space leaves the built environment in favor of an imagined one, the virtual. It insists that we do not need the physical architecture to promote contact between citizens, and in some ways the appearance of these networks can be the alternative for the alienation and anonymity of urban life. In a later paragraph clarifies that this does not mean people do not socialize in the physical space, the point is people doing increasingly however the relationships do not start in the physical environment. He puts the example of the Couch Surfing, a network that helps people to find a couch to sleep in any city around the world.

Public space is in motion, even a few years ago we talked about the movement from traditional squares to shopping malls as places for social interaction. One year ago, Federico Soriano defined good architecture in Planeta Beta with the following idea. He said something like that the public space, on the understanding that it is the place where people interact and regardless of whether if we talk about housing, squares or office spaces; is what makes architecture relevant. So, whither is the architecture going if the social space abandons the built environment?

In relation with this issue I am reading a very interesting book by David de Ugarte, Pere Quintana, Enrique Gómez and Arnau Fuentes called “From nations to networks.” This is the summary that explains a similar change on a larger scale:

“…the passage of an economic society and decentralized communication -the world of nations- into a world of distributed networks, son of Internet and globalization, makes it increasingly difficult for people to identify themselves in national terms. For that reason, there are new identities and new values that in the long term will end up overcoming and subsuming the national and statist vision of the world. The identity comes from the need to materialize or at least to imagine the community where develops and produces our life. The nation appeared and extended precisely because the old local collective identities related to religion and craft and agricultural production were no longer represented in a satisfactory manner to the social network that produced the main part of economic, social and political activity which determined the environment of the people.”

“Similarly, for a growing number of people, the national market expresses every time less the set of social relations that form their daily lives. Neither the products which they consume are national, nor the contexts of the news that determine the main collective vital courses,… The national identity is getting very small and very large at the same time, it is becoming strange.”

“…and it’s funny, because I was once asked about the year 2000, what you think about the next millennium? And I told them: architecture will disappear.” Yona Friedman.

This is a text I wrote on July of 2009. I introduce it here to link with the previous post, a reflection of Mark Shepard and Adam Greenfield about the disappearance of the physical part of the city.

I decided to write this post to clear up certain ideas which have been around me for a while about the future of architecture. To understand my doubts, because currently they are just that, firstly I should make clear what I mean by physical architecture and virtual or non-physical architecture. Physical architecture is the tangible, what is constructed. And the virtual would be everything that we can not touch but affects from different disciplines to the architecture. The recent explosion in digital technologies allows us to not only understand but also use them in new ways to generate architectural processes. Communication, education, sociology, participation, politics, ecology, exhibitions…

MS: “…, I was interested in thinking through the derivate impact on urban space of an alternative, extreme informatics regime, a future-fiction where literally all information loses its body and is off-loades from the material substrate of the physical city to the personal, portable, or ambient displays of tomorrow’s urban information systems. What happens when mobile and pervasive technologies are used to substract this kind of information from the physical world, reducing rather than adding to the visual field of the street?

AG: ” You know, I am not sure that the visual load ever does get reduced. Just because there will be this additional, personal informational channel made available doesn’t necessarily imply to me that the mass or builfing-scale channel goes away. Although I must say that the image I get of your take on things is a striking one – I imagine a rather starkly monochromatic city blosoming into “augmented” chaos when you blink the contact lenses on or whatever…

One of the things I think does happen, though, is that the ability to find one’s way around independently of the embedded environmental cues begins to atrophy. This is just that favorite McLuhan quote of mine being worked out in detail: “Every extension is also an amputation.”…”

It has been six months of hard work, generating many ideas and understanding the opportunities that emerging technologies are opening up for Tesco. We have identified customer trends and we are starting to form prototypes of some products. Tesco is at the forefront of innovation within retail. This project is highly confidential, so at this [...]